January 11, 2010 — ODBMS.ORG, a vendor-independent non-profit group of high-profile software experts lead by Prof. Roberto V. Zicari, announced that for 2010 it has extended its focus to include besides object database technologies, new developments in data management, such as the linkage to service platforms, operation within scalable (cloud) platforms, object-relational bindings, NoSQL databases and new approaches to concurrency control. ODBMS.ORG offers educational resources in all of these areas .

ODBMS.ORG has exclusively published a new expert article by Rick Cattell on “Relational Databases, Object Databases, Key-Value Stores, Document Stores, and Extensible Record Stores: A Comparison.”

“Traditionally, the obvious platform for most database applications has been a relational DBMS.” You might use a specialized parallel relational DBMS if you required high throughput for “data warehousing”, or an object database system if your application had unusual functionality or performance requirements, e.g. for in-memory caching or fast relationship traversal. However, an RDBMS like Oracle or MySQL has usually been the answer. This has changed somewhat recently. There is now recognition in database research that “one size does not fit all”, for example in the widely-referenced paper by Stonebraker and colleagues. says Rick Cattell, formerly at Sun Microsystems, co-creator of JDBC, and chair of the Object Data Management Group (ODMG). “And in the Web 2.0 industry, many companies have abandoned traditional RDBMSs for so-called “NoSQL” data stores that provide much higher scalability, or they have built a distributed caching layer on top of RDBMSs. More scalable RDBMSs are also coming to market” so Cattell.

“”Relational Databases, Object Databases, Key-Value Stores, Document Stores, and Extensible Record Stores: A Comparison.” is available for free download (PDF).

About ODBMS.ORG
ODBMS.ORG (www.odbms.org) is a vendor-independent, not-for-profit educational program on object database technology and the integration between object-oriented programming and databases. Designed by Prof. Roberto Zicari of Frankfurt University, the program’s goal is to promote and further the use of object databases – by offering free resources for students, faculty and researchers at universities and research centers, as well as for JAVA and .NET developers in the commercial and the open source world. Content is provided by a panel of internationally recognized experts, who share research articles and teaching materials with the community via the organization’s Web portal.

About ODBMS Industry Watch Blog In his ODBMS Industry Watch Blog (www.odbms.org/blog/), editor Prof. Roberto V. Zicari (ODBMS.ORG) muses about latest trends in the industry. The blog includes his exclusive series of interviews On_Innovation. . The ODBMS Industry Watch Blog is part of ODBMS.ORG. Contact ODBMS.ORG at editor@odbms.org.